Influenza: the autumn of 1918

September — November 1918 and into the winter

Closed by telegraph: The influenza reached Indiana in September 1918, and the state's answer was the broadest public-health order in its record. On 6 October 1918, United States Public Health Service officials mandated a statewide quarantine for Indiana; the State Board of Health spread the order by telegraph to the board secretaries of every county, ordering them to "immediately close all schools, churches, theaters, amusements of all kinds, and to put a ban on all public meetings and gatherings." Factories, business houses, and restaurants were at first exempted. The order ran in its first form to 20 October, and across the state health officials placarded the residences of the infected. South Bend's own voice in that autumn survives in its papers as the state historians quote them: one South Bend writer framed the quarantine as a needed rest — "In our present nervous state of society, due to the war, the Liberty loan, the draft, etc. … we have found something new to nurse our nervousness; and possibly the quarantine is necessary as a means of rest." By November the city's patience was the story: the South Bend News-Tribune reported on 12 November that "the merchants of the city are becoming restive.

These dreary and dismal days are getting on the nerves. Business is practically at a standstill," that the merchants considered staging a protest against the quarantine's continuation, and that school children were "running on the streets and congregating in spots as is their custom" — and officials extended the quarantine into the winter regardless. The state's toll, as the Indianapolis News had it, stood at 3,266 Indiana residents dead by the end of November 1918. A South Bend death toll for the autumn of 1918 is not in the record reached: the city's papers of October and November 1918, in the Hoosier State Chronicles, are the named pull that would settle it, and until they are read, this entry prints the state order, the city's own reported experience, and the state figure, and no city toll.

The military side of the same autumn stands in the Wars record at pointer size here: in the 1921 Gold Star Honor Roll's St. Joseph County section, pneumonia is named in forty-three of the ninety-four entries the Wars record counts — the signature, in that record's phrase, of the pandemic working through the camps, the transports, and the hospitals, down to the county man who died of influenza aboard the transport President Grant on 3 October 1918 and was buried at sea.

Sources:

1. Indiana History Blog (Indiana Historical Bureau), "Spanish Influenza" series, working from the state press of record — the September 1918 arrival, the 6 October 1918 federal mandate of a statewide quarantine, the State Board of Health's telegraphed closure order (schools, churches, theaters, amusements, public gatherings; factories, business houses, and restaurants at first exempted), the influenza placards, the South Bend News-Tribune of 12 November 1918 on the merchants and the extended quarantine, the South Bend writer's framing of the quarantine, and the Indianapolis News figure of 3,266 Indiana dead by the end of November 1918.
2. Wars and unrest record of this history — the 1921 Gold Star Honor Roll's St. Joseph County section (a hundred and nine entries by the corrected count, pneumonia named in forty-one of the hundred and two complete records) and the President Grant death of 3 October 1918, cross-referenced here at pointer size as that record owns the military telling.